Detecting changes in the pitch, rhythm, or other dynamics of music is useful for audio analysis applications. For example, when creating a photo slide show set to music, the viewer's multimedia experience can be enhanced by automatically synchronizing the visual effects of the slide show to the salient parts of the music. The viewing experience can be further enhanced when the multimedia is synchronized to dense ornamentation in the music, such as a rapid succession of drum beats over a relatively short period of time, or a mid-song guitar or base solo, or an introductory flute or piano solo, or other localized irregular parts of musical content that can be distinguished from an overall repetitive global structure of that musical content. Such localized irregular portions tend to provide a memorable or otherwise aurally dense and distinguishable part of the music, and are generally referred to in this disclosure as dense ornamentation. Such dense ornamentation, whether it is a single event such as the banging of a gong or a series of events such as a drum solo, may manifest itself as a localized pattern in the corresponding audio signal. However, some existing algorithms that are designed to synchronize multimedia to the playback of music don't identify, respond to, or otherwise exploit such localized dense ornamentation features to enhance the multimedia experience. Rather, such existing algorithms are generally configured to focus on global components of the music.